A lot of good, honorable Republicans used to believe there was a safe middle ground. You didn’t have to tie yourself hip to hip with Donald Trump, but you didn’t have to go all the way to the other extreme and commit political suicide like the dissident Jeff Flake, either.

"used to." That was back in fukkin' nineteen diggity six, right?

Extra LOL for describing Jeff Flake's "I don't like him very much" as "political suicide."

No, it's because Republicans want to win at any cost, and will sign any bargain to advance their goals. When every belief requires cognitive dissonance, the only maxim left is victory over the enemy.

First, he asked the party to swallow the idea of a narcissistic sexual harasser and a routine liar as its party leader. Then he asked the party to accept his comprehensive ignorance and his politics of racial division. Now he asks the party to give up its reputation for fiscal conservatism.

Trump has never "asked" anyone to do anything. He demands it. This is why he was an also-ran multi-bankrupted real estate burnout with poor taste until NBC decided he was exactly the low-budget huckster they needed to sell Extreme Makeover: Job Edition.

That’s the way these corrupt bargains always work. You think you’re only giving your tormentor a little piece of yourself, but he keeps asking and asking, and before long he owns your entire soul.

David Brooks' True Confessions

Nobody of any import or seriousness ever thought Trump would cease to be Trump. Their bargain was how long he would be useful for. They're gonna get their tax cuts, they're gonna get their pensions, they're gonna get their lobbying and consultancy gigs, and they're gonna munch canapes while the rest of us learn how to cook dog food.

The Republican Party is doing harm to every cause it purports to serve. If Republicans accept Roy Moore as a United States senator, they may, for a couple years, have one more vote for a justice or a tax cut, but they will have made their party loathsome for an entire generation.

WILL have? We're already looking down the barrel of "America vs. the Southern Taliban." The Republican Party after Trump is going to be a stupid, bitter, reactionary, angry mass of insurgents, like Raiders fans with fewer teeth.

The word “evangelical” is already being discredited for an entire generation.

Fukkin' David Brooks, reporting in from 1996

Donald Trump seems to have made gaining the world at the cost of his soul his entire life’s motto.

Implies there was a point where Donald Trump had a soul. His fuckin' elementary school buddies hated his ass.

The reason, I guess, is that the rot that has brought us to the brink of Senator Roy Moore began long ago. Starting with Sarah Palin and the spread of Fox News, the G.O.P. traded an ethos of excellence for an ethos of hucksterism.

All but two of these people have been dead for a decade or more. One of them was a democrat. One of them was the fucking pope, not a member of the Republican Party. One of them was a goddamn soviet dissident.

Compare the tax cuts of the supply-side era with the tax cuts of today. There were three big cuts in the earlier era: the 1978 capital gains tax cut, the Kemp-Roth tax cut of 1981, and the 1986 tax reform.

Liberals now associate supply-side economics with the Laffer Curve, but that was peripheral.

Uhhhh....

It was based on the idea that if you rearrange incentives for small entrepreneurs you are more likely to get start-ups and more innovation.

For broad definitions of "small"

Those cuts were embraced by Nobel Prize winners and represented an entire social vision, favoring the dispersed entrepreneurs over the concentrated corporate fat cats.

Good old Saint Milton. Worthy of note: Moniz won the Nobel prize for inventing the lobotomy and Kissenger won it for bombing the shit out of Cambodia. It's not exactly an unimpeachable credential of virtue.

The rot afflicting the G.O.P. is comprehensive — moral, intellectual, political and reputational.

Also past tense. If there were any undecayed flesh left we wouldn't be here.

More and more former Republicans wake up every day and realize: “I’m homeless. I’m politically homeless.”

I mean, if the GOP hadn't been rotted already, they never would have let it get half this bad. Saying that the GOP is rotting now is just a confusion of cause and effect. Cads like Brooks were just too stupid to notice that the party was rotten until the stench was undeniable.

"Seeing the light" is a relative term. This is the same column in which he still tries to make an intellectual case for Reaganomics. It's not as if race baiting and denialism and witch hunts are new to the GOP. Brooks wants to go back to the "good old days". I wonder how far back? Stonewall? Jim Crow? Red scare? Slavery? The good old days were shit and his party has been trying to get back there for a long time. He isn't seeing any light. He's seeing his own shitty reflection laid bare in the rhetoric of Trump et al.

The Republican Party is doing harm to every cause it purports to serve. If Republicans accept Roy Moore as a United States senator, they may, for a couple years, have one more vote for a justice or a tax cut, but they will have made their party loathsome for an entire generation. The pro-life cause will be forever associated with moral hypocrisy on an epic scale. The word “evangelical” is already being discredited for an entire generation. Young people and people of color look at the Trump-Moore G.O.P. and they are repulsed, maybe forever.

You don’t help your cause by wrapping your arms around an alleged sexual predator and a patriarchic bigot. You don’t help your cause by putting the pursuit of power above character, by worshiping at the feet of some loutish man or another, by claiming the ends justify any means. You don’t successfully rationalize your own tawdriness by claiming your opponents are satanic. You don’t save Christianity by betraying its message.